Sierra Sands Board gets budget overview

“It’s been a difficult year,” said School Services of California Ron Bennett as he briefed the Sierra Sands Unified School District Board of Education on the current fiscal status of the district.

By John V. Cianijciani@ridgecrestca.com

“It’s been a difficult year,” said School Services of California Ron Bennett as he briefed the Sierra Sands Unified School District Board of Education on the current fiscal status of the district.He said the passage of Proposition 30 does not provide new money for the district this year.“What it provides is the absence of another cut,” he said. “If Prop. 30 failed, you would have taken a cut of about $450 per student at the midyear.”He said Assistant Superintendent of Business Services Elaine Janson planned for that cut as required by the Kern County Office of Education by setting aside some one-time money to cover the cut for the first year.“However, you would have made further reductions than you already have in order to cover the cut on an ongoing basis, because it was an ongoing cut, not just the first year, but every year,” Bennett said. “As a result of Prop 30 passing, in the first year, your budget is basically a sound budget.”He said the presence of the China Lake Naval Air Weapons Station resulted in federal funding.“You have worked hard to make sure you get your fair share,” he said. “You’ve always used what I consider to be conservative budgeting practices. That has kept you from having to make the kinds of cuts other districts have. There are other districts that have cut as much as two weeks off the school year, and were going to cut a month off the school year if Prop. 30 had failed.”Bennett said the district enjoyed good labor relations over the past seven or eight years.“From time to time the labor relations get a little tight, but in the end, your bargaining units have been helpful,” he said. “We haven’t always gotten there in a straight line, but in the end, we got where we need to be.”He said the legislative analyst’s report shows California’s economy continues to grow over the next two or three years.“Even though we don’t get additional revenue to Proposition 98 this year, we will get revenues to Prop. 98 in the next three or four years,” said Bennett. “The legislative analyst was much more positive than in the past. They’re forecasting that schools will receive a cost-of-living adjustment in the January budget.”He said his calculations show the state will have enough money to pay the cost-of-living adjustment and a little bit more.“The problem is that 10 years ago, I would have said if the state has more money, we’ll get our share of it,” Bennett said. “Over the past five years, we have not gotten our share of it.”He said Sierra Sands has a system called the fair share in place with its bargaining units.For every new dollar that comes into the district, the teachers get approximately 61 percent.“They pay out of their 61 percent their own step and column for their bargaining unit,” he said. “They pay their health-and-welfare benefits increase, and the rest of it becomes a pay raise. Before we had this recession, those pay raises tended to be a little higher than the districts around you. You could afford them. During this recession, we started out each year by saying if we have to cut $1 million, the teachers’ fair share of that is 61 percent of that.”Bennett said the result has been layoffs, increased class sizes or reductions through attrition.He also talked about the weighted student formula.“The weighted student formula is a proposal the governor made last year,” he said. “The father of the weighted student formula is Dr. Michael Kirst, the president of the State Board of Education.”Bennett said Kirst believed the poorest, lowest-achieving students in the state were falling further and further behind.“His solution is to eliminate what we call base revenue limit, where you get most of your money, and eliminate most of the categorical programs, where you get the rest of your money, and replace that with a new concept,” said Bennett. “You would get a base grant, then you would get two supplemental grants — one based on the number of English-language learners you have, and the other based on the number of poor students that you have as judged by the number of free and reduced-priced meals.”He said if the formula had been applied, Sierra Sands would have taken a substantial cut in funding, because while the district has a substantial number of students in both groups, the numbers are below the state average.“The governor has made it very clear that he is going to bring that formula back again this year, but he is trying to fix it,” Bennett said. “We’ve had meetings over the past month with a group of about 100 people. We had all the unions and others there to help the governor repair the formula. He came out last January and said I’m going to take money from districts like Sierra Sands and give it to Los Angeles.”He said at School Services, “We have never seen a program rolled out in a worse fashion than that program.“I made the statement that if the governor got his program in place, not one student in California would be better off,” he said. “All of the districts like yours that are far below the national average in funding would have even less to work with.”Bennett said if California were to raise its funding to the national average for students, the current distribution formula would work fairly well.“If California doesn’t raise the funding, and we assume that we’re always going to be last in the nation, then any funding model, the current one or the weighted student formula is going to bring us far behind other states,” he said. “We’re hopeful that the governor will make that commitment to leaning toward the national average.”

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